currently I'm working around the problem by avoiding parsing and giving the user no option to type the date, providing DateField and DateChooser instead and formating with DateField.labelFunction.

Note that the standard mx.controls.DateField has it's own parseFunction() and formatString(), which are better to set to null if you care about non-US formats.

Internally the component will try to parse text representation of the date, and may fail with the built-in function. If these properties are set to null, DateChooser will work with DateField's date value directly instead.

Also I've adopted somebody's utility for parsing date, fixed bugs and extended functionlity to handle at least some additional formats.